tenpastmidnight blog
Making hay while the sun shines
» Thursday, January 15, 2004 «
New websites, PHP and ColdFusion
I've been working on two personal PHP projects recently, one for a website I should be launching soon, and another for a local events announcement system which I should be open-sourcing once I've finished it.
As usual when I'm learning a new programming language, something works a bit differently and I end up writing far too much code, then going back to re-write it more simply once I've got myself in a corner. Fortunately, I've had some great help from fellow Farmies Alex, Matt and Tolan on the coding side, and several more Farm members with testing. My main website is almost ready. Before I launch I'd also like to get my new website for my freelance work pretty much complete, or at least a little less embarrassingly incomplete than it is now.
While I'm a big ColdFusion fan and wrote the early version of one of my projects in it, the high cost of hosting meant I looked to PHP for cheaper hosting and just as reliable a product. I won't be deserting CF completely, a recent memory upgrade to my iBook means it now runs happily under OS X via Macromedia Jrun.
However, at the moment I'm putting a lot of work in to getting better at PHP, which will be helped by the latest version of Matt's book: PHP in 24 Hours. He brought some to the pub last night, which were fallen upon so fast by fellow Farmies that I didn't manage to nab one, but have been promised a chance to grab one later. This latest version is very significant because it introduces the new object oriented code in PHP 5, which can be a very efficient way of coding, if you know how to do it right. So: ignore the little 'PHP 4.3' on the cover, the good stuff is PHP 5, and you're going to want to know all about it.
As usual when I'm learning a new programming language, something works a bit differently and I end up writing far too much code, then going back to re-write it more simply once I've got myself in a corner. Fortunately, I've had some great help from fellow Farmies Alex, Matt and Tolan on the coding side, and several more Farm members with testing. My main website is almost ready. Before I launch I'd also like to get my new website for my freelance work pretty much complete, or at least a little less embarrassingly incomplete than it is now.
While I'm a big ColdFusion fan and wrote the early version of one of my projects in it, the high cost of hosting meant I looked to PHP for cheaper hosting and just as reliable a product. I won't be deserting CF completely, a recent memory upgrade to my iBook means it now runs happily under OS X via Macromedia Jrun.
However, at the moment I'm putting a lot of work in to getting better at PHP, which will be helped by the latest version of Matt's book: PHP in 24 Hours. He brought some to the pub last night, which were fallen upon so fast by fellow Farmies that I didn't manage to nab one, but have been promised a chance to grab one later. This latest version is very significant because it introduces the new object oriented code in PHP 5, which can be a very efficient way of coding, if you know how to do it right. So: ignore the little 'PHP 4.3' on the cover, the good stuff is PHP 5, and you're going to want to know all about it.
